On an early morning walk to Barnes Memorial Park, one can see dozens of elderly Chinese performing their daily movement exercises under the guidance of an experienced leader. Other seniors stroll around the perimeter of the park; still others sit on benches watching the activity around them or reading a Chinese-language newspaper.

By now children are making their way to school, their backpacks bulging with books. They talk to each other in both English and Chinese, but mostly English. Many are going to Ynez Elementary, the oldest school in town.

When a nearby coin laundry opens its doors for business,...

Monterey Park became a city shortly before the First World War and undertook plans for development that would transform the small farming community into an elite suburb. To lay the foundation for this study of Chinese immigration, I have divided the city’s demographic history into three periods: its incorporation and push to develop, during which racial segregation policies were common and condoned; its growth from the end of the Second World War to 1970, when diverse groups of newcomers seemed to be united by a spirit of optimism and a sense of opportunity; and the coming of the immigrant Chinese,...

Before the influx of Chinese immigrants, Monterey Park was a quiet, comfortable, and spacious bedroom community of tree-lined streets and modest single-family homes with expansive yards. It was seen as a safe and ideal integrated community in which to raise a family.

The early 1970s, however, brought dramatic changes as the relative wealth of the new immigrant Chinese became apparent. Many of the newcomers purchased houses in the best neighborhoods. A few years later, the development of multiple-unit condominiums offered a popular housing option for many of the less wealthy Chinese as they began to spread throughout the community and...

From the 1940s through the 1960s, Monterey Park was a community whose activities revolved around active service clubs, friendly churches, and a collegial chamber of commerce. Two hotly competing weekly newspapers (the Progressand theCalifornian) together thoroughly informed residents about what was going on in town. Since the early 1970s, however, the city’s social and cultural landscape has been reshaped. This chapter describes the changing environment in Monterey Park from the 1940s through the conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s, when ambivalence toward the new immigrant Chinese, antagonism toward bilingual education, and hostility toward the proliferation of ethnic-oriented businesses...

By the 1970s the population of Monterey Park was increasing so rapidly that its traditional tight-knit economic, social, cultural, and political structure could no longer be maintained. The dilution of the core community actually started several years before the influx of Chinese immigrants reached its peak. For many years community life had focused on the older northern residential and central Garvey-Garfield business sections of town, slighting or ignoring areas on the outskirts. Alice Ballesteros, who grew up and still lives in the southernmost, largely Latino section, notes that, “for a long time, the south end did not have the strong...

In May 1982 aMonterey Park Progresseditorial headed “A Different City Council” pointed out that for the first time, four of the council’s five members (Manibog, Chen, Almada, and Peralta) came from ethnic minorities. Also, for the first time, moreover, there were two Hispanics serving together (Almada and Peralta), a Chinese American (Chen), and two women (Davis and Chen).¹ The new council’s new perspectives were soon evident as well; one of its first acts was to denounce federal raids on businesses that employ undocumented workers. After learning of an Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) raid on a Monterey Park...

The movement for English as the official language was not unique to Monterey Park. As early as 1980, voters in Miami, Florida, a city where large numbers of Spanish-speaking Cubans have settled, overwhelmingly approved a law (since reversed) restricting the use of Spanish and Creole. In November 1984, voters in California passed by a 71 to 29 percent margin Proposition 38, an advisory ballot measure recommending that all election materials be printed in English only.¹ Fillmore and Alameda, two small California communities, passed official-English ordinances in early 1985, and several others considered similar actions later on.² But Monterey Park, had...

The resolution of the recall effort in Monterey Park by no means ended the city’s contentiousness. The 1988 city council election brought to the fore another Chinese American woman candidate whose campaign themes of racial harmony and controlled growth received a warm reception, but the old divisions were still apparent, and new ones developed. One was the split between recall survivor Barry Hatch and his former supporters. RAMP’s slate of city council candidates performed poorly in the 1990 election and were replaced by a new pro-growth majority that quickly changed the policy direction of the city. Two years later the...

Immigrant adaptation to life in the United States began receiving scholarly attention early in the twentieth century, in response to the arrival of European newcomers in large numbers. The preeminent theory has been Robert Park’s (1950) “race relations” cycle, which posits that immigrants initially clash with natives over cultural values and norms but, over time, do adapt and are eventually absorbed into the mainstream society. This four-part cycle of contact, competition, accommodation, and assimilation, according to Park, is “progressive and irreversible.”¹

Oliver Cox, inCaste, Class, and Race(1948), defined a race as “any people who are distinguished, or considered...

The concentration of large numbers of people of color in urban centers across the country and their impact on the broader U.S. society will continue to be a pressing issue into the twenty-first century. Monterey Park illustrates the social, cultural, and economic intersection of these demographic changes with questions of urban growth and development. Though it has by no means come fully to terms with the resulting dislocations, its history to date may suggest the kinds of realignment and accommodation necessary to a resolution of the issue.

Three prominent changes have taken place in Monterey Park since the early 1970s:...